He signed with Interscope in early 2013, dropped his debut album Finally Rich later in the year including his biggest commercial hits “Love Sosa” (platinum) and “Hate Being Sober.”.For the sake of brevity, here’s a timeline of detailed highlights leading us to Chief Keef’s status today:
#Drill music series#
What we didn’t know, however, was how important these names would become in hip-hop’s global history.Īfter the success of “I Don’t Like,” including the memorable GOOD Music remix, Chief Keef’s career took a series of hard and fast turns. The buzz was there, but once a shirtless Cozart and a teenaged Tavares Taylor linked and shot a video for regional hit “I Don’t Like” during Cozart’s house arrest, drill took a step onto the world stage without even knowing it.įrom the online hip-hop community to music titans as diverse as Lady Gaga and Kanye West, the world finally knew Chief Keef, Lil Reese and the GBE imprint. The source of drill music, Chicago’s clique-based gang life run by teens and young adults, existed long before a young Keith Cozart dropped his first two mixtapes The Glory Road and Bang in 2011. But these factors, along with a heavily-trap influenced sound and catchy raw melodies, are also what made drill popular. The fatal subject matter, unpolished vocal styles and unfiltered artist images made drill as anti-pop as possible. Adding to that is how drastically different Chicago’s new rap stars were to the city’s reflective, poetic OGs including Common, Lupe Fiasco, Rhymefest, and Kanye West. Most obvious is the blatantly violent flows and chaotic sounds that reflected the realities of its hottest stars. There was a lot about drill in the early 2010s that shocked a lot of people. But now that it’s become the mainstream language of violent street struggle across hemispheres, we need to step back to get a good look at the evolution of drill.Īny thorough conversation about drill’s rise has to start in Chicago. 2” were produced by London drill producers.ĭrill was already important in hip-hop history as Chicago’s local speciality. NY drill hits like Pop Smoke’s “Welcome To The Party” and 22Gz “Suburban” and “Suburban, Pt. With artists like Sheff G and Fivio Foreign leading the wave, the cadences and melodies of NYC drill owes much to London’s current rising stars. Drill music’s rise in England has also made London a hotbed for debates about gang violence and its origins, with politicians pointing to drill as the problem while activists and artists are quick to defend drill as only a symptom of the economic oppression and racism responsible for the desperate conditions in London’s ends.įor all the jokes about UK pop culture being stuck in the Victorian era, it is actually the energy and sound of UK drill that has influenced the emergence of drill in New York City. The raw energy surrounding the original drill movement of Chicago has since become the basis for artists from the streets of England to speak their truths with stark honesty, causing a shift away from Grime as the dominant form of UK rap. Even crazier is that drill has stimulated the rise of hip-hop’s profile in Australia, Ireland, and most notably in England. However, no one could imagine this hyper-real, hyper-violent sound would come to define the traditionalist hip-hop Mecca of New York City in the next decade. The eruption of Chief Keef and Chicago’s drill movement in 2012 was instant rap lore. Chief Keef and Brixton duo Skengdo x AM in the video for "Pitbulls" (Skengdo x AM/YouTube)